About
=====
This application is designed for measuring power usage. It does it by
recording the reported battery statistics as it replays recorded event
histories, and then using that to estimate power consumption and total
battery lifetime.
Usage
=====
The basic operation of gnome-battery-bench is:
1) Select the test and test options such as duration
2) Make sure the laptop is running on battery
3) Hit the Start button
4) Wait for the test to end
To end early you can use a global Control-Alt-Q global shortcut or
hit the Stop button. It may take a while for the test to end after
being stopped since gnome-battery-bench plays the "epilogue" event
history to try and clean up from the test.
The most relevant displayed statistics are:
Average power: average power during the test
Estimated battery life: how long the battery would last from full
at that power rate.
Each test run is saved on disk in ~/.local/share/gnome-battery-bench/logs,
and older tests can be viewed by switching to the Logs view using the
control in the title bar.
You will want to stop as many extraneous programs as possible when
running the tests. (Unless you are trying to test how much power those
programs take!) Browsers in particular will add a lot of noise.
gnome-battery-bench tries to disable the keyboard backlight when
running tests - if this doesn't work, you should disable the keyboard
backlight in BIOS settings to get consistent results - the keyboard
backlight can take a quite surprising amount of power.
Adding new tests
================
A test consists of a number of files, which can either be installed
systemwide in /usr/share/gnome-battery-bench/tests or per-user in
~/.config/gnome-battery-bench:
.batterytest
.prologue # optional
.loop
.epilogue # optional
The .batterytest file contains meta-information about the test such
as the name of the test. The other files are event log files that are
replayed during the test:
1) prologue filed is played
2) power logging is started
3) the loop file is played repeatedly until the test time is finished
or the user ends the test.
4) power logging is terminated
5) epilogue file is played
To record a event log file you can use the gbb command line tool supplied
with gnome-battery-bench:
gbb --record > mytest.loop
Recording is terminated with Super-Q. You currently will have to edit the
to remove parts of the Super-Q shortcut at the end. (A bug.)
Installation
============
Because of the root-level helper daemon it uses, gnome-battery-bench needs
to be installed system-wide. This is done as:
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc [--libdir=/usr/lib64]
# The libdir setting is only correct on some distros such as Fedora.)
make
sudo make install
The configure script will complain about missing libraries - which are
too numerous to be listed here, but should be available on any system
with GNOME 3.14 or newer installed.
Security
========
A helper daemon that runs with root privileges is used to simulate an
attached keyboard and mouse and replay events at a low level. Since
arbitrary events can be replayed, this could in theory be used to
attack another user's account on a multi-user system.
To eliminate any security risk, Polkit is configured by default so that
an admin password has to be entered when starting gnome-battery-bench.
To allow gnome-battery-bench to be run by admin users without entering
a password, you can create a file /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/10-gnome-battery-bench-local.rules
with contents:
---
polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
if (action.id == "org.gnome.BatteryBench.Helper.SimulateEvents" &&
subject.isInGroup("wheel")) {
return polkit.Result.YES;
}
});
---
It probably would be possible to enhance the helper daemon sufficiently
so that events can only be played back to the originating session of playback
requests, but this would require quite detailed understanding of the mechanisms
for binding input devices to seats and tracking active sessions per each seat.